In Portrait, starting in 1981, the photographer uses a uniform light and identical position in all the sitters, in order to depersonalize to the maximum the subjects portrayed. At first, his images were of small format, but from 1986 the artist opted for a large photograph.

Wilf Noyce Leads Porters by Crevasse in Western Cwm in Front of the Nuptse's Ice Wall", 1953. Everest60

Textos en inglés / English translation

On February 6 is the birthday of

Bård Løken, Norwegian photographer born in 1964 in Vadsø, living in Elverum.

He has worked as a photographer since 1985. He has taken pictures for a number of books, and worked with some of Norway's best known authors since the start of the 1990s. Løken mainly deals with nature and landscape photography. He has also been picture editor for the last four issues of NAF Veibok.

Løken is a member of Norske Naturfotografer and signed to the picture agency Samfoto.

Carolyn Cowan, London-based psychosexual and relationship therapist born in 1960. Prior to her career as a therapist, she was a fashion designer and photographer.

She grew up in Chelsea, London and was exposed to fashion at a young age.

While in her early 20s, Cowan met members of the Italian group Krisma, a new wave band formed in 1976 with Maurizio Arcieri and Christina Moser. The lead singer of the band, Moser, allowed Cowan to paint her face for shows. Soon Cowan was doing body painting and wanted to become a make-up artist. When she was 22, Cowan sold her clothes to buy a train ticket to Milan to pursue a career in fashion. Her first job was working for Italian Vogue. With her experience from Vogue, Cowan returned to England and worked in the pop music video industry. She would eventually work with such personalities as Bryan Ferry, David Bowie and Freddie Mercury who were part of the booming 1980's video music industry. She also worked with singer Steve Strange. Among her achievements during that time was helping Duran Duran "perfect their decadent, glamorous look" for the music video of their hit song "Rio" and travelling to the South of France to film Elton John's video for "I'm Still Standing".

By the time Cowan was 28, her life of excess was taking a toll. She was addicted to drugs and alcohol.

During the summer of 1991, while in Dublin to do David Bowie's makeup for a video. Cowan said Bowie encouraged her to stay sober and attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. By 31 July 1991, Cowan had given up smoking, drugs and alcohol and changed her line of work. She began focusing on photography. Among her first jobs was an Ilford Photo-sponsored trip to India to photograph nomads. While there, Cowan was exposed to Hindu spirituality and Sikhism, which would later fuel her passion for yoga and meditation.

Cowan's professional life nowadays is largely focused on her work as a psychosexual and relationship therapist.

David Montgomery, photographer known for his portraits of the rich and famous born in 1937.

He studied music at the Juilliard School of Music. He was an assistant to photographer Lester Bookbinder in New York and accompanied him on a working visit to the United Kingdom in the early 1960s and stayed.

Heralded by Q Magazine in their special edition on Psychedelia as having produced some of the most iconic images of the sixties.

Montgomery's photographic subjects have included Bill Clinton, Lucian Freud, Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, Margaret Thatcher, Peter O'Toole and Andy Warhol. His photographs of Andy Warhol have been included in The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, USA. For his photograph of Hendrix, which is shown in the inside cover of the 1968 album Electric Ladyland, Montgomery started a controlled fire using a can of petrol to photograph flames behind Hendrix.

David Montgomery has contributed regularly to Vogue, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, Rolling Stone, House and Garden as well as many books .

Montgomery has two daughters from his first marriage. He married his second wife, Martine née King, in 1982. They have a daughter Marissa Montgomery and a son Max Montgomery, who is also a photographer. He lives with his wife in Chelsea, London.

Bandi Rajan Babu, Indian photographer born in 1938 at Korutla, in the Karimnagar district of Telangana, known for his black and white pictures of tribal people. He also owned the Rajan School of Photography.

Starting his career as a lecturer at JNTU Fine Arts College, he went on to establish his own school and master the craft of ‘pictorial photography'. He was a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, an Associate of the Federation of International Photographic Art, France, and an Honorary Fellow of the AP State Akademi of Photography.

Rajan took to serious photography in 1960 after joining the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, and became a pictorial, fashion and glamour, industrial and advertising photographer. He drew inspiration from Raja Triambak Raj Bahadur, the first one from erstwhile Andhra Pradesh to be honoured with the status of Associate of Britain's Royal Photographic Society. Rajan, who was on the faculty of JNTU, got his first international honour from Belgium, received the APRS honour in 1983, and followed it up with the Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society in 1987.

"One of my cousins presented me with a camera when I was in my seventh class and I casually clicked some photos that were appreciated by all and that was the seeding of a photographer in me. Later, when I joined the five-year diploma course in commercial art, I came across Raja Triambak Raj Bahadur, a pioneer in pictorial photography. It was he who inspired me to wield the camera..."

Thomas Ruff, German photographer born in 1958 who lives and works in Düsseldorf. He shares a studio on Düsseldorf's Hansaallee, with other German photographers Laurenz Berges, Andreas Gursky and Axel Hütte. The studio, a former municipal electricity station, was converted between 1998 and 2000 by architects Herzog & de Meuron, of Tate Modern fame, and updated with a basement gallery in 2011.

Ruff acquired his first camera and after attending an evening class in the basic techniques of photography he started to experiment, taking shots similar to those he had seen in many amateur photography magazines.

During his studies in Düsseldorf and inspired by the lectures of Benjamin HD Buchloh, Ruff developed his method of conceptual serial photography. Ruff began photographing landscapes, but while he was still a student he transitioned to the interiors of German living quarters, with typical features of the 1950s to 1970s. This was followed by similar views of buildings and portraits of friends and acquaintances from the Düsseldorf art and music scene, initially in small formats.

Ruff studied photography from 1977 to 1985 with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf Art Academy)

Commenting on his influences, Ruff said, "My teacher Bernd Becher, showed us photographs by Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz and the new American colour photographers." He is often compared with other members of a prominent generation of European photographers that includes Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky and Rineke Dijkstra. From 2000 to 2005, Ruff taught Photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

Seymour "Sy" Kattelson, American photographer born in 1923, whose earliest work documents working class New Yorkers during the years immediately following World War Two.

His paternal grandfather was a vaudeville musician whose lifestyle influenced Kattelson's decision to become an artist. It was while working as a delivery boy for the Aremac Camera store on 43rd street that he first became aware of the possibility of working professionally as a photographer. A German refugee couple who were the owners of a studio to which he was making a delivery on sensing his interest in their work encouraged him to pursue photography.

He was an early practitioner of street photography and was associated with the Photo League from 1947 until its closing in 1951. His portraits, frequently taken without his subjects' awareness while traveling through the streets or riding the city's subways, convey the dignity of their lives as lived in public places. The depth of his photographs often comes from the tension between the grittiness of their urban settings and the contemplative sense of his subjects' as being lost within themselves.

From 1953 to 1955 Kattelson worked as a fashion photographer for Glamour and for Fashion and Travel where his experience in street photography led him to be one of the first to use a 35mm camera to photograph models in outdoor urban settings. He photographed the first Newport Jazz Festival in 1954. In 1958 he became a color darkroom technician and manager at a large commercial color photography lab. In 1961 he moved to Woodstock, NY where he founded the Tinker Street Cinema, at the time one of the few art house cinemas outside a major urban area.

Alfred Gregory, British mountaineer, explorer and professional photographer born in 1913.

A member of the 1953 British Mount Everest Expedition that made the first ascent of Mount Everest, he was in charge of stills photography and, as a climbing member of the team, reached 28,000 feet (8,500 metres) in support of the successful Hillary-Tenzing assault on the summit.

Gregory was educated at Blackpool Grammar School in England. Before World War II he climbed extensively in the Lake District of England, Scotland and the Alps, and during the 1940s he led several new routes in Britain. During the war he was an officer in the Black Watch, serving in North Africa and Italy. In 1952 he joined Eric Shipton’s Cho Oyu expedition and during the 1950s he led several expeditions to Rolwaling and the Gauri Sankar massif, where 19 peaks were climbed and a plane table survey was made, and to Ama Dablam, Distigil Sar, the Karakoram and the Cordillera Blanca in Peru.

For 20 years he worked freelance for Kodak UK, lecturing on photography and presenting his pictures to large audiences throughout Britain and Europe.

He spent a lifetime travelling on photographic assignments around the world. Along with his wife Sue he produced many photojournalistic picture stories through the Tom Blau Camera Press News Agency in London. His work has been exhibited throughout Britain, France, Belgium, America, Africa, Poland and Australia.

In 2002 they held a joint exhibition at the 80 Gold Street Gallery, in Collingwood, Victoria, with photographs of 'Walls, Doors and Windows'.

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